WordPress in a next generation PHP world

HHVM has now released it’s second long term support release and PHP 7 is in the final stages of implementing changes. It’s an exciting time for PHP and to be a PHP developer which means it is also an exciting time to be a WordPress developer since it creates an opportunity for WordPress to once again embrace forwards compatibility.

While I was at PHPUK, one of the most common conversations I had was people being critical of WordPress for supporting PHP 5.2 as a minimum. Many of those same people became less critical once they find out WordPress runs great on PHP 5.6 and that many people run it on HHVM.

For the last several weeks, WordPress has been running it’s unit tests on PHP7 nightly builds. They’ve been running on HHVM for months. Right now, the unit tests are not passing for either one and as far as I know, have never passed for either one. This is a problem.